Altered Carbon : Book Review
Altered Carbon was a great read. Action packed and gritty with a slightly different, but very cyberpunk feel to it.
Why Cyberpunk?
- Mind Uploading/Downloading
- Body Augmentation (drugs, enhancements, wired)
- Artificial Intelligence
- Vast Megacorps (family owned due to virtual Immortality from Cortical Stacks)
Courtesy of Amazon, the book blurb
In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself.
Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or sleeve) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.
Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . .
Cool Concepts from the book:
- Meths (Methuselah – Biblical reference meaning someone who has lived centuries)
- Mind uploading and downloading – even for meetings in other countries
- Imprisonment means being stored in a facility – the individual will face culture shock when they come back
- Borrowing Bodies – renting someones sleeve (body) because you like the look of it, and the owner can’t afford to keep exclusive when in prison
- Biological Attraction – When the mind is transferred to another body, the biological attraction does not occur, but the memories still exist
Some worthy excerpts:
Up there, you got the comsats. Raining data. You can see it on some virtual maps, it looks like someone is knitting the world a scarf …. Some of that Scarf is people. Digitised rich folks, on their way between bodies. Skeins of memory and feeling and thought, packaged up by numbers.
If your good, like she was, and you’ve got the equipment, you can sample those signals. They call them mindbites.
Excerpt when one clone is talking to it’s original self, about why they should talk, even though they both have the same memories:
‘Sometimes, it helps to externalise things. Even if you talk to someone else about it, you’re usually talking to yourself. The other guy’s just providing a sounding board. You talk it out.’
A somewhat refreshing change to the hard noir Gibsonian cyberpunk. Well worth the read, I know I am going to have to hunt down some other Richard Morgan titles. An interesting exploration of what makes people human, is it their memories, their physical being, or as this book suggests a combination of both. Also questioning what death actually is in a world where you can be “resurrected” providing your memories encoded in your cortical stack are still intact. The concept of Real Death only occuring when your memories (stack) are destroyed.
In good cyberpunk questioning, the “what is humanity?” and what happens to ethics when technology frees us from past certainties like death or lifespan, intrigues throughout the novel.
Rating: 8.5/10